Point of Sale

One nice thing about being a writer in the post-modern era is that you can insert the name of a brand and save yourself pages of laborious description or observation. Such short-hand short cuts in character development and scene setting allow the artist to concentrate on the things that really matter, such as creating paranoiac plot twists that riff on every conspiracy theory since the Medicis, your deal memo with the publisher or where the decimal falls in the terms of your new media royalties.

Would that Dickens, Tolstoy, Austen and Dos Passos had recourse to such valuable tools! Steinbeck with all that slow, plodding stuff about that damn turtle.

Dickens spends at least a half-page describing uncle Pumblechook, the miller, in Great Expectations, resorting to wholesale fabrication of suggestive comic words like "farinaceous" and running-on to references to other long-ago labor skills and custom that no one could possibly understand today. Wouldn't it have conserved valuable effort, avoided reader drift and said the exact same thing to put: "Pumblechook was the real life Quaker Oatsman as he walked out of the place where they make flour and bready things, dusting off his Doughboy apron - hoo hoo"? You see him as jolly, doughy and endearingly comic, don't you? You can presuppose the pathos and "just plain folks" stolidness of his character. You just know he'll do Pip a good turn, because, like Pillsbury and Quaker Oats, he's got that seal of approval.

This, dear readers, I put to you as the premier creative wonder of the post-modern age. No longer need the writer or the artist labor to make things up. As quick as cut and paste, we can draw from a nearly limitless supply of cultural references, easily accessible to anyone who matters, and clearly infer anything they need know.

Metaphor, symbol and hyperbole are now as limitless as the number of ctrl + x and ctrl + v you can execute. But it takes a keen eye to really string references to the Weltanshauug to really capture the Sturm und Drang.

Writers! Painters! Poets and Dancers! Your audience awaits, this month's retro/future Old Navy typeface emblazoned across their chests! Unlimited demand. Nearly limitless supply. We are the perfect market force!